Nickelodeon's 'Doug': Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret history and little known facts behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. We are your nematodes of nerdery, banging on trash cans of trivia. My name is Jordan run Tug.

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Speaker 1: I'm Alex. I'm excited. My name is Alex.

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Speaker 2: It was hard to work in some puns in the intro there. This doesn'tn't really lend itself to it.

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Speaker 1: We're your dougs people happy yet.

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Speaker 2: And today we are talking about a classic from the golden era of nineties Nickelodeon. That's a little name with a big reputation. We are talking about Doug Yes, the eleven year old with his head in the clouds, who navigates the trials and tribulations of youth with his best friend, his dog, and the girl of his dreams, the fair maiden known as Patty Mannaise. Despite his every boy qualities, the imaginative visions he writes in his journal not a diary, a journal dramatically illustrated the high highs and crushing lows of being a kid. In that sense, this show is not unlike my beloved Wonder Years, which we still have to do.

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Speaker 1: We're working on that.

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Speaker 2: It's an impressionistic vision of adolescents that both connected with those going through it and those.

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Speaker 1: Who enjoyed looking back at it.

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Speaker 2: The show kicked off the block of Nicktoons programming way back in nineteen ninety one, along with Rugrats and Ren and Stimpy, but Doug was always my favorite.

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Speaker 1: Why, uh, well, should be pretty obvious.

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Speaker 2: I was an anxious and sensitive boy who daydreamed a lot and processed unrequited crushes through writing while claude in a sweater, vest and khakis. So all in all, watching Doug I felt seen Rand and Stimpy was way too grotesque for me. Rug Rats was a little too mannic and weird, but Doug was gentle and even genteel, and he provided a nice alter in a sense. He made the world safe for Sissy's. Sissy representation is so important, it's crucial. He was such a contrast the cartoon heroes out there, Like Bart Simpson, it was rude and crude and had sort of a gen X slacker energy. Doug, on the other hand, was painfully earnest and sweet and so was the show. I really struggled to think of a Nickelodeon show that took such pains to impart messages of kindness and morality.

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Speaker 1: I imagine this means that you hated the show. Ye wait to tee me up there? What did you think of that? You know? I just think it was like, looking back on it, it was honestly just something I watched because I had no interior life. Get you in touch with your interior life by how you No, No, not at all. I remember zero. I was a very amoral child. I remember zero. All of my morals came from martial arts films. I know, I remember, like I don't. I remember Doug. I remember the music, I remember the beats, I remember the curious his sack that beats the sick beats. No, I remember the fact that he's that he wears like that was the first place I saw that David Byrne big suit was Doug. For some reason, say, but I don't remember it particularly fondly or with interest. She said, we discussed this episode. No, I mean it's part of like the whole Nickelodeon milange that I just like, you know, when I was a kid, before I had interests or like I said, an interior life and I would just be flipping through it. I'd be like, oh, Doug is on, That's fine, I bury it, no malice. But it's like it's you know, it's a it's a scoop of vanilla ice cream? Are there things like that?

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Speaker 2: This is a sincere question that just shows that I am now old. Do kids have that now? I think there's so much choice and you can be so proactive of you know, you have anything available at any time, so you make the choice to watch or do X y Z that people just know in the background.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think the experience is the same unless it's like, yeah, just like putting on I've heard like people put on anime in the background and just like that role or any I mean anything that just has like a sheer volume with it. But I think, like so many, uh, the generational divide right now is just like algorithms. Like back in the day, you your algorithm was which channels you knew the the numbers too, yeah too, you know, And now it's just like you can be on you know, YouTube and that's your TV and it's actually cued into what you've watched before, which is again why I was like, Okay, I'll watch Doug. Doug is on, you know, but it's you know, it's it's it's got to it's it had a unique style and and and I suppose it's appeal was precisely that it was so sweet, non threatening. I mean, you did have like red and stimpy, which was like a horrifying fever dream. And then uh, I remember Ava Monsters the most. Yeah, that was a creepy show too. Yeah, but yeah, I don't know, there's I would like Doug episodes. It's it's like a just stalt image for me. I'm like, ah, yes, I remember all of these characters, all of these music cues. I can hear Patty Bannay's weird March simpson preternaturally gravelly voice. But I remembered like not a specific detail about it at all. Yeah, we're not going to get into, like, you know, anything too deep in terms of like the plots on this show, on this episode, but yeah, no, it's something I look back on fondly. And I was really surprised about how many internet fan theories there are out there about Doug for a show that was so not inflammatory There's a lot out there, which we'll get into, but one of the theories that just really resonated with me was that a lot of people put forth the theory that Doug Funny is the original Emo Kid, and I enjoy this. Allow me to quote the theory put forth by a retro junk user named System. Doug was the original Emo Kid. He sat in the corner of the park and wailed on his banjo, singing love songs about Patty Mannaise, what a little kids do, idolize cartoon characters, Emo and the subsequent Emo Kids are all Doug's fault. Doug was Emo, keeping a journal, getting his ass kicked by bullies, and wearing a sweater vest. Doug made being a loser completely acceptable. Sounds like he's taking the negative approach in this, but I say, yes, he did make being a loser completely acceptable, and I say, God bless him for it. I don't know if he's the original Emo Kid, but it is funny when like you look at Jay Gatsby might be I was gonna say, it's funny when you look at like a very specific kind of like nineties hardcore punk band. They like Preppy Chic was kind of in fashion, So I guarantee you you can find pictures of like life of Agony or like integrity or any of these Like those are probably bad examples, but like you can definitely find like nineties hardcore or emo bands that dressed like Doug Funny. Like to a te I mean he kind of looks like a gap ad. Yes, yes he does. Well.

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Speaker 2: From the real life love story that inspired Doug and Patty to the drama of the show's transition from Nick to the House of Mouse, the animation ledend who provided the character's voice, and the completely insane conspiracy theories that have taken roots surrounding the series.

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Speaker 1: Here's everything you didn't know about Nickelodeon's Doug chime in Wherever with You bet I will try and stop me.

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Speaker 2: Doug Funny is the cartoon alter ego of illustrator Jim Jenkins, who somehow manages to have an even more cartoonish name than the character he creates. That's a great name, he would later say, Doug is an exaggerated version of my memory of being a kid.

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Speaker 1: Doug is me, and I am Doug, and we are all together.

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Speaker 2: And many plots on the show are taken directly from his own life and story. Editors would talk about coming up to him and arguing that a certain point in the plot that Jim proposed was just didn't make any sense and didn't seem very realistic, and he would say, well, that's the way it happened. So this was a lot of this was really plucked from his own life. And despite moments like that, it sounds like he was a lovely man to work with. Born in nineteen fifty three to a very devout household in Virginia, Jenkins was a compulsive doodler from his earliest days, and he'd later say, as a little kid having to sit quietly in church, you'd pray there's a little blank spot on the bulletin to draw on church is a big theme in this episode. These doodles provided an outlet for a very straight laced, polite Southern boy to vent some of his more out there thoughts and point of view. And you know, I said a devout family, I mean a devout family. This will become something of a theme in this episode. But his upbringing was pretty strict. He says that he based the whole episode of Doug not being able to dance on the fact that he wasn't allowed to dance as a kid for religious reasons, which is something that he admits now quote seems absurd.

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Speaker 1: I mean, did he grow.

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Speaker 2: Up in the town in footloose, like, yeah, exactly. Jim Jenkins moved to New York City in the late seventies, which must have been a hell of an adjustment for this guy who wasn't allowed to dance.

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Speaker 1: As a kid. I was gonna say, nineteen seventies New York like this stuff that made Frank Miller lose his My good lord, I'm surprised he's alive still.

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Speaker 2: I'm just like super imposing the creator of doug On like Shaft's body in the opening of the movie walking through Times Square and all the Born theaters.

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Speaker 1: So that's weird.

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Speaker 2: And in the late seventies, he worked as an artist and puppeteer for the pioneering children's TV network Pinwheel, which would eventually morph into Nickelodeon in the following decade. But his path to creating one of the first Nicktoons was a little more winding than that. He had a really rough go for a few years there in the early eighties, and he said that He created Doug quote during a very dark time in my life. The whole art thing wasn't really working out for him. So he was stuck in a corporate ad agency job that he hated, and he'd gone through a bad breakup, and he also had a brutal bike accident that sidelined him for a time. And so he started sketching this character who became kind of a fantasy escape for him, almost like a Walter Midi figure, and that became Doug. And he started to flush these sketches out with this partner, David Campbell's production partner, his future production partner, during happy hours at a Mexican restaurant in Greenwich Village which features prominently in this story. I'm really sad I couldn't figure out which Mexican restaurant Grannis Village it was. I'm going to say it was senyor Swank's, which is no longer there, but it was on LaGuardia and Bleakers. So Jim Jenkins would drown his sorrows at this Mexican place and try to forget about his crappy life and develop this Doug character as a way of blowing off steam. And he'd say much of Doug was created under the influence of Margarita's, which is not what I expected for this very sweet show. Before long, he'd built this out into a whole town of characters, many of which were pooled from his own childhood. He later say, I wanted to create a place where there was no overdue rent and no delinquent phone bills, a place called Bluffington. He was a big fan of the Peanuts cartoons as a kid, saying that he admired the quote simplicity and honesty of the storytelling. He admired its purity, and in this way, Doug became his own personal Charlie Brown and Company, and similar to Charles Schultz. He'd insist that the show had a very strong moral compass, with lessons baked into each episode in a way that has kind of unshakable religious overtones.

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Speaker 1: We'll get more to that later, but.

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Speaker 2: At its heart, Doug is very much Jim Jenkins. He'd later say, I didn't keep a journal like Doug did, but I drew, and Doug was definitely about this any guy my alter ego. Some of the stuff I drew was very dark and cynical, and some of it was very silly. That was the beginning of figuring out that character.

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Speaker 1: And initially the character.

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Speaker 2: Wasn't named Doug but Brian, which is sort of like a Monty Python esque take.

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Speaker 1: On a random generic man's name. But this name really just wasn't landing for Jing.

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Speaker 2: When he started to try to develop Doug, the character, I should say, into something that he would market, he thought that the name Brian was too quote fancy, surely.

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Speaker 1: The only time that's ever been said about the name Brian.

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Speaker 2: He said he wanted a name that was super simple and straightforward, a one syllable kind of deal, much like his own. Jim Jenkins later said, if this were the nineteen forties, I would have called him Joe, And I thought that Doug had that feeling and that sound about it. It was a conscious choice because I wanted him to be this very neutral, middle of the road guy.

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Speaker 1: He's been.

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Speaker 2: The lame Yancy is borrowed from his grandfather. And that's all I have to say about that. And while well the topic of names, I want to give a quick shout out to Doug's neighbors Bud and Tippy Dink.

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Speaker 1: This was the first time I'd ever heard the.

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Speaker 2: Sociological term DINK, which stands for double income, no kids, which is precisely what the dinks are, which is why they have plenty of disposable income to buy very expensive things.

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Speaker 1: I don't know they were swingers.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I definitely got that at that vibe. I always had dink in my mind. Always sounded vaguely obscene to me.

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Speaker 1: It could be, yeah, who's to say, Who's to say? There were several early incarnations of Dog that predate the Nickelodeon show, including two commercials, and you could never have I could never have guessed what these were. The first was an ad for the Florida Grapefruit Growers in nineteen eighty eight, featured Doug and his signature sweater vest on a pogo stick because friend of the pod, pogo stick, Friend of the pod. Grapefruits. I like grapefruits. I do too, It's my favorite citrus. Really. Yeah, This is how you know we're running out of steam creatively, is that we're just getting into discourse about citrus fruits. The second ad, featuring both Doug and his dog, pork Chop, was for a nineteen ninety USA Network commercial. Do I don't remember this? You do I do.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, it almost looks like an old Red Bull commercial, you know the ones tho oh.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, Okay. But Jim Jenkins's actual ultimate goal for a time was to make Doug into an illustrated book series. He assembled some of these sketches into a book called Doug Got a New Pair of Shoes, and went out pounding the pavement. Title needs work, maybe not. In the nineties, Bar was a lot lower. He would good naturedly joke that he was turned down by all the best publishers in New York, and then as a last ditch effort, he reached out to Nickelodeon at the top of the nineties. Nickelodeon had started out as a more family friendly children's broadcaster in the late nineteen seventies under the name Pinwheel. In nineteen seventy nine, it was rebranded under the name We Know Today, and for most of the eighties Nick got by on pre licensed content stuff like Teenage Mutant, Ninja Turtles, whorls Waldo. But they started to want to get into original content of their own, and they wanted to find creative visionaries and develop their first original slate of animated series. The first Nicktoons so, on a friend's recommendation, Jenkins got a visit with Nickelodeon executive Vanessa Coffee, who is a hugely important figure in the history of children's animation and TV in general in the past thirty years of TV. She ordered series for Ran and Simpy Rugrats, and so Jenkins came in and presented her with a copy of his book, Doug got a new pair of shoes. She said, get out of my office. No. Uh, As Jenkins later described, Coffee looked at the cover of the book and in the middle of me describing it, just ran out of the room, which is, you know, disturbing. But he hadn't needed to worry. She was running to tell her boss that they needed to take this show to pilot immediately. She later explained why she was so immediately drawn to it. She said, Nickelodeon was we're kids, We're the kids channel, We're your channel, and so I thought Doug fit into that perfectly because it was their demographic and their story. Yes, twelve year olds lends into the renderings of a deeply religious, middle aged Southerner m A. Nickelodeon's stated goal with this in this era was being anti Disney so they didn't focus group stuff and test things out. They went by purely on intuition, and Jenkins would say, Vanessa Coffee had this notion of creator driven innovative stuff. They signed a deal that included options for five seasons of thirteen episodes apiece that sounds insane, Yeah, kidding me. This thing would get out and the big computer that lives in David Zaslov's head would say, the algorithm is saying this isn't getting enough ratings. We are deleting it immediately. Oh my god, we live in hell. They ended up not making that many for Nick, but we'll cover that in a few minutes. The show began production immediately and Jenkins put together a small animation studio Jumbo Pictures, leading to an eight minute pilot episode called Doug Can't dance can't as in forbidden from or can't isn't physically unable?

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Speaker 2: I don't remember physically unable so like you or emotionally unable. I'm emostally unable. I can physically do it. I'm able bodied, I just can't.

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Speaker 1: Uh. Nickelodeon was shockingly hands off in those days, and they didn't get rend and much in the way of Notes director Yvette Kaplan, who'd gone to co direct episodes of Beavis and Butthead with Mike Judge as well as the movie version of that Beavis and Butthead to America, said, we had a lot of freedom in those days. It's difficult to remember, in this day of insanely flooded consumer marketplace IP driven crap that a lot of the cartoons of this era were invented solely to sell toys or promote comics which were then linked to toys, or to promote movies which were then made into comics and toys. And Doug was all original baby, an original scoop of well worn, one white cotton.

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Speaker 2: Yes, now we have to talk about the world of Doug, starting with the town where he moves in the first episode, Bluffington. It's a town filled with eccentric characters, not unlike Andy Griffiths, Mayberry or the Simpsons Springfield, and though its location has never stated, Bluffington is a modified version of Jenkins's hometown of Richmond, Virginia. Two of the most obvious references to Richmond are Judy Funnies School the Moody School, which I always thought was just a joke about her because she's so moody, but it's named after the Moody Middle School, which is a real place, and also the four Leaf Clover Mall, which is a nod to the clover Leaf Mall in Richmond as well. And also Doug moves to twenty one Jumbo Street, which it never really picked up on this that was apparently a joke about the high school. Cop showed twenty one Jump Street as well as the series production company, Jumbo Pictures Incorporated. The show bible for the series was extensive, jing Jenkins went nuts. He had four plans that he for each character's home, as well as maps of each street in Bluffington, and he also had elaborate backstories for the founding fathers of this fictional talent as well, which I guess they did touch on that at some points during the series, but still, he really went nuts on the backstory, probably because it was based so much on his own life.

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Speaker 1: It's so funny to me that so much detail went into this to create just the most boring sounding stuff in the world, Like and you literally how long did he sit and think of names before arriving on mayonnaise as a surname.

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Speaker 2: Well, he took that from there was a friend of his name, Pam Mayo.

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Speaker 1: I know, I'm just saying it's it's it's He was like.

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Speaker 2: Marguerite is deep at that point, I know again as wacky as man Aise.

00:19:45
Speaker 1: Exactly like the most boring man alive. It's like, it's like Jim Morrison taking paote to write like good Day Sunshine.

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Speaker 2: Well, like the town itself, the inhabitants are borrowed from jim childhood.

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Speaker 1: The most extreme example of this, if you could really.

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Speaker 2: Okay, extreme is a bad word to use in the context of Doug, but the most elaborate example of this is the wonderful Patty Mayonnaise, who steals Doug's heart as soon as he moves to town in the first episode.

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Speaker 1: She's based on two people.

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Speaker 2: A woman named Patty I don't think her last name has ever been publicly stated, and also someone named Pam Mayo, hence the Mayonnaise.

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Speaker 1: Why would why would? Why would a parent do that to their child, give them the first name that rhymes with ham? Oh wow? How do they not think of that? I didn't think of that? Did you ever see that?

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Speaker 2: Sunday Night Live sketch with Nicholas Cage where it's just him and his pregnant wife like working out trying what they're gonna call.

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Speaker 1: The baby, and every name that the wife.

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Speaker 2: Suggests, Nicholas Cage shoots it down with like he comes up with some reason why the kids will make fun of him, and then like a fat X guy comes.

00:20:57
Speaker 1: And is all right, mister and missus as Wipe Nelson.

00:21:00
Speaker 2: So there mister mister Aswhite Nelson here, and he's like, it's pronounced as weepey.

00:21:05
Speaker 1: It's Swedish. That's medium funny.

00:21:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's good. Nicholas casually sold it. So there are these two women that he based Patty Manaise on. It's my understanding that he had a crush on both, but Patty no last name, was his big crush.

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Speaker 1: And this is sweet. When the show was.

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Speaker 2: About to launch, I guess they sent out cards announcing the premiere, and Jenkins sent one out to this Patty woman and wrote her a little note that said, pay particular attention to Patty.

00:21:31
Speaker 1: You were the inspiration.

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Speaker 2: Considering her name was Patty, I'm guessing she probably had an idea, but it was nice that he gave her a heads up, I forgot how tragic Patty Manne's backstory is. Her mom died in a car crash before the series began, which also paralyzed her father, which is why he's in a wheelchair.

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Speaker 1: Dark. Yeah, such groundbreaking representation for the sadness of life in this early slate of Nickelodeon shows, you know.

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Speaker 2: Just as stark as like Chucky's mom's subplot from rug Rats. But I guess Disney kind of has the precedent of every lead character.

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Speaker 1: Has some hargedy story. Yeah.

00:22:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, anyhow, onto happier, greener pastors or bluer pastors.

00:22:17
Speaker 1: I should say.

00:22:18
Speaker 2: The character of Skeeter, Doug's best friend is based on Jim Jenkins' best friend from childhood, and this is cute too. They had fallen out of touch but reconnected after Doug launched, which I just I think that's very sweet.

00:22:30
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:22:31
Speaker 2: Less sweet is the character of Roger the Bully, who was indeed based on an older neighbor of Jim Jenkins who lived down the street and I guess this bully lived next door to the Klock's family, hence the bully's last name. And when the Doug movie came out in nineteen ninety nine, they held the premiere in Richmond just in honor of Jim Jenkins's background, and so Jim reached out to the real life Roger and said, I hope you don't want to beat me up for this character. According to Jenkins, the ex bully laughed and said, well, you know, we all have somebody who's a little older than us, a little further along and a little more forceful. He told me I had some bullies in his life too, which I had never thought about. He's a good guy that all sounds like non excuses to me. All the goofy names in Doug, which for my entire life I assumed we're just made up for the sake of being quirky, are in fact taken from real life.

00:23:24
Speaker 1: That's yeah, even he even found though non interesting, somewhat like that, like ah whatever.

00:23:32
Speaker 2: Missus Wingo was Jenkins's favorite teacher in school, and that was Doug's teacher.

00:23:37
Speaker 1: The name of Doug's unseen principle, mister butt Savage, which I always was so sure was yeah, some kind of obscene joke, was actually the name of his elementary school principle. Oh god, yeah, no word on the vice principal, mister Bone. I think that name was made up. They modeled that character after Don Knots, and Jim Jenkins later said, anybody that was from Richmond, it was from my past. It's got a sort of extra bonus when they watched this show. He didn't even change the name.

00:24:06
Speaker 2: This was 'tsued Oh, Doug's beat nick or hippie or whatever.

00:24:10
Speaker 1: She has.

00:24:11
Speaker 2: Older sister Judy has kind of an interesting literary background, which feels appropriate for her. She's always clad in dark clothes and a beret in glasses and is very theatrical, and reportedly she's named after the play Shakespeare's Sister by Virginia Wolf, in which she writes that if Shakespeare had a sister, she would be named Judith. And that's also why the character of Judy Funny is obsessed with shakespeare plays. And also, before we move on from this, we've perhaps should given a nod to the Nema TODs, which are a recurring bit in Doug and also a number of.

00:24:42
Speaker 1: Other nicktoons which I didn't realize.

00:24:44
Speaker 2: They crop up not only in Doug, but Ren and Snimpy Hey Arnold, all real monsters, and also SpongeBob SquarePants and the Nema toads actually have a basis. In reality, they're microscopic roundworms of the phylum Nema toda. In the world of the show, they are just elusive monsters who live at Stinson's pond, and Doug goes searching for them in the second episode. I don't think we ever see them.

00:25:07
Speaker 1: What is your conception of a Nema tode? Is it like a snipe or more like a lockness monster kind of thing? I was seeing creature from Black Lagoon. Oh you got you gotcha? Okay, okay, As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information.

00:25:29
Speaker 3: After these messages, we got to talk about the writing of the show, which was done with some of the same story editors who worked on the Adventures of Pete and Pete and Clarissa explains it all tonally, three very different shows.

00:25:55
Speaker 1: Man CLIs explains it all that just sucked, really boring show.

00:26:02
Speaker 2: Really.

00:26:03
Speaker 1: The only thing I remember that as a guitar stinger, when that guy comes in the window.

00:26:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember always finding it weird that this guy would just just kind of had a ladder handy to.

00:26:11
Speaker 1: Go into this teen girls bedroom. Friends. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't like Melissa Joan Hart.

00:26:18
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:26:18
Speaker 1: Is it because she's really in the Shirley Temple. Well, that's certainly a red flag. One of the things that said Doug apart was that, as we said earlier, Jenkins insisted that each episode center around some sort of ethical dilemma and contain a moral of some kind. For example, there's an episode where Doug finds a wallet filled with money and grapples about whether or not to return it to the owner, Rube. He buys fancy shoes that don't actually fit. His teacher discovers a rude caricature he drew of her, and he has to own up to his actions and apologize. Jenkins asked the writing staff to literally write out the central theme of each episode at the top of the script. Before turning it in. He would tell the writers, I want the show to remain relevant in thirty years. Jenkins would later say, I of course wanted the show to be funny and well structured, but more than anything, I wanted it to matter. I wanted to make a statement about how, at least from my perspective, we ought to treat each other and ought to live. One of the ways that jenkins intensely religious upbringing influenced the shows. There are a lot of little nods to that. If an episode takes place on a Sunday, you'll see that Doug's family is in their church clothes. And there was a time when Jenkins even considered becoming a youth minister. He said, I had a lot of training that way. When I graduated college, I actually worked in a church as an apprenticed minister. I pretty quickly realized that was not for me, and I was very grateful. There's nothing wrong with it, but it was not my path. And in ten years he'd be slugging down Margarita's in the East Village and creating animation. That is a cautionary tale that people still tell in his perish growing up. If you move to New York, you will follow the path of ruin that Jim Jenkins, that Pastor Jenkins did. If you don't follow the word of God, you will create beloved Art a Melpatos cartoon series. Oh yeah, in a way.

00:28:06
Speaker 2: I mean it's kind of like mister Rogers, where he had this religious background and he decided to turn the television as his pulp.

00:28:13
Speaker 1: But we put ourselves through enormous pain to avoid pain, and I had this notion of what if we didn't do that, what if we just told the truth. But in the adult world, the notion of truth and not truth is complicated. I didn't want to show all of the ambiguity of the adult world to kids. I wanted to show kids a world where everyone took honesty seriously. This approach was unique in the animation sphere at the time. Doug director Ken Kimmelman would say to me it was a breath of fresh air looking at Doug. It really had humanity, good spirit and ethos. With so many other cartoons, you can get laughs from contempt, but this had a lot of respect in it. It was kind of uphill, not downhill, speaking of humanity good. Nope, I got nothing. Do you remember that popsicle commercial where the kid was like, he was like the colors, colors, the color colors, I'm colorblind, kid. Well, the colors, Jordan, the colors of the characters on Doug. In case you can't make that, thanks, In case you can't remember, Doug's world is filled with people who are literally every hue of the rainbow. Roger is green, Doug's best friend, Skeeter is blue. There are purple folks in there is I think, aren't the Dinks purple? One of the.

00:29:25
Speaker 2: Dinks talk he's Studebaker maybe, or maybe he's blue. No, baby might be blue because he's a blue blood.

00:29:30
Speaker 1: I don't know. I forget. But yeah, now we're getting into eugenics. Many have theorized that over the years this was an intentional political statement on race or commentary on the world being filled with all kinds of people. In fact, this was not the case. It was born of alcoholism and Mexican food. Jenkins said that he and Doug co producer David Campbell came up with the notion of unorthodox color tones in a margarita stupor. As a quote. He added that the colors themselves were totally random. On the Huffington Post, now it's time to color in the people. So you grab your eight shades of skin, you put them in your hand and start eight shades of skin. I was gonna say, isn't that what Buffalo Bill said?

00:30:09
Speaker 4: Ah?

00:30:10
Speaker 1: But then I looked back up at my full set of two hundred design markers and thought, I'm making this up. I can do it. I want to why stop here, He says he began experimenting with the character of Patty mannais Patty is a little more thoughtful. I wanted her to have dark skin, not going to unpack that one. So I picked a flesh range color and that can be a great tan or ethnicity. But what But it all just started out as an experiment and how they could go. I don't think I like Jim Jenkins. I don't think I care for him.

00:30:43
Speaker 5: Okay, I can understand, uh, Jim said, he you know, this was completely random.

00:30:53
Speaker 1: There there's no logic to character as being certain colors. You know, Roger the Bully is green. But Jim Jenkins said he went out of his way to make Doug's sweet old teacher Missus Wingo also green, so viewers wouldn't get the idea that all green people were bad, which is obviously true in real life. Yet despite all this, over the years, fans have looked to find a logic in the assignment of the colors. The most prevalent theory is that Skeeter and his family are black. Jenkins denies this, saying people are certain that Skeeter is an African American guy. I'm like, well, he's blue. You put together that he's the music guy and he does some rap stuff or several other things. Great, if that's how you see him, that's great. It's not a bad thing, but I never planned it. Skeeter is blue and he's Doug's friend. But then you may ask why was Doug white? Jenkins said that this was because the character's design was finalized before he was inspired to start experimenting with color shades. But this has somewhat troubling implications as the show ages with Doug and his family being presented as the white norm the main characters. In two thousand and nine, a blogger going under the nom diplume Wolfy g. Nards, which is a reference to the movie Monster Squad, in which a child kicks a werewolf in the groin and exclaims Wolfman's got Nerds, wrote, you've talked about that in this episode of the series before. It's a deeply formative memory for Menards messrs Nards wrote, every supporting character around Doug is some wacky shade, except of course, for Doug Funny, who is a regular white kid. The main character is white in a world full of colorful yet ancillary characters, what does that tell our children. It tells him that only the white race is deserving of a spotlight. Only the white race is worthy of being the star of the show. All other skin tones must remain in the background. Jezebel posted a lengthy exploration of the topic of Bluffington's racial breakdown in twenty thirteen titled why was Doug from Doug White when everyone else was multi colored? In this piece, the author Callie Buseman writes, the universe of the show hovers at the edge of being the most bully infested post racial society of all time, and then is like nafket, Let's just have a white protagonist. Journalist Matthew Klickstein did a little digging on the topic in his epic Toome Slimed, an oral history of Nickelodeon's golden age, and the responses from Nick execs are staggeringly, breathtakingly not media trained. Rather than claiming that this was all merely an accident or privilege based racial blindness, one of Nickelodeon's founders explicitly said that Nick was catering to a white audience because the others didn't get Nickelodeon. He literally called them the others, children who couldn't afford cable were getting some children's programming from PBS. Sure it brings up issues of diversity and income level, as wow, the others didn't get Nickelodeon. There'll be no Nickelodeon for the others, not until they learned their place. In the same book, Jenkin's production partner David Campbell said, Look, we're not black, peace people, we're not Mexican, but we want the cartoon to speak to all groups. Campbell said, and slimed, how do we get past the barrier of ethnicity? And Jim Jenkins, the show's creator, said, let's try coloring them all different colors. The writer Callie Boseman commented on the he's black, but he's blue, but he's black explanation, calling it a double edged sword. She said, it's interesting to see how he tend to project race distinctions into an ostensibly raceless arena. Again, though, since Doug's entire family is white, it's not as raceless as one would hope. So Skeeter became a non stereotypical point of identification for black viewers, which was great, but he also became a dead end of sorts a way to allow for increased diversity while simultaneously avoiding the often fraught process of representing race. It's also worth noting that there was a semi satirical Facebook group founded in twenty eleven or relatively recent in the timeline of people still using Facebook yeah called why the does Doug fun only mac on white Chicks. It's mission statement reads, in part, over one hundred students are enrolled at B. B. Bluff Middle School, changed from Bluffing to middle school in February of nineteen ninety six. They are all of different colors, some purple, some green, some yellow, some blue. It's a crock pot of diversity. And out of these hundreds of female students, there's only one, I repeat, one white girl. Her name is Patty Mayonnaise, and who just dug just to be his lover. You guessed it, Miss Patty Mayne's coincidence? I think not. Thus, race has to be a factor. She'd just do a show where we read unhinged Facebook group postings. What do you think of all that? You know? They're right?

00:35:45
Speaker 5: Like?

00:35:46
Speaker 1: It is like a breathtakingly easy out of having to actually talk about diversities, to be like, look, everyone's different, colors like yay. But it's also very telling that like the middle aged, intensely religious guy from a the literal capital of the Confederacy as his home, was like, oh yeah, but the main characters are white. Yeah, because I'm white, Doug is me. The rest of you aren't real. They're all just funny colors. Only me and my family in our church clothes are real. What about you? What do you think?

00:36:22
Speaker 2: I think it's a good intentions product of its time. It's the way it's somebody in the nineties saying, oh, yeah, I don't see color, I'm colorblind.

00:36:30
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:36:30
Speaker 2: It seems like the most progressive thing you could possibly say, and now the spectrum has shifted so much that that's incredibly tone deaf. I just think it's another one of those types of cultural mistranslations.

00:36:42
Speaker 1: I just think it's either the most generous reading is that he's breathtakingly unoriginal, you know, just like stealing every character name and basing the characters off himself and his family and then being like, well, how do I make this look different? I'll throw a dart at my Marker collection and go from there. Like that's the most charitable thing you can say, is that he's just a lazy, lazy creative. Wow.

00:37:08
Speaker 2: Wait, maybe that's why he did the colors in the first place. It's like how Disney gave Mickey Mouse like three fingers or something, or four fingers instead of five.

00:37:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe it's just so the people wouldn't sue. Well, now it's time to.

00:37:20
Speaker 2: Talk about one of my favorite names in the cartoon world. I love this guy, the Man of a Thousand Voices, mister Billy West.

00:37:27
Speaker 1: Gotta love Billy. Oh yeah, Billy West, right, probably the most important person that we're going to talk about in this episode.

00:37:35
Speaker 2: Yes, he's one of the most prolific voice actors of his generation. He's been called the new Mel Blank by E W in nineteen ninety eight, and he was slash is I think one of the only people who could basically approach the diversity of Mel Blank's voice. Mel Blank was the Looney Tunes Man of a Thousand Voices. He did everybody, and so did Billy West. I'm forgetting his start on Boston's legendary WBCN radio station, then work with Howard Stern. He went on the play I don't know why I led with this The Honey Nuts Cheerios, b the red eminem Philip K. Fry from Futurama, and most notably the two title roles on Ren and Stimpy. I guess first he was Stimpy and then after animator John k was fired, he took over the role of Wren, which is crazy that he was able to take over a voice as distinctive as Wren, you know, and he didn't have any choice in the matter. He was like, oh, yeah, do that? Do that now now that we're a huge show. Yeah, that is crazy. The guy his vocal cords are elastic. So Billy West was assigned to the role of Doug by Nickelodeon executive Vanessa Coffee, the person who green lit the show, and I guess she was probably the same person who tapped him for Ren and Stimpy too, considering she green lit that and amazingly for all of his just incredible vocal talent.

00:38:47
Speaker 1: Jim Jenkins, who.

00:38:49
Speaker 2: Never really seems to have a bad word to say about anybody, was initially against Billy West casting, but ultimately he was won over and admitted that Billy was the best choice for the job. If Jim Jenkins the heart of Doug, than Billy West is the soul. For the role, he adopted a quote higher kind of genderless voice meant to signify the eleven and a half year old hadn't quite hit puberty yet.

00:39:11
Speaker 1: Wes said, I was that kid too. I loved Doug.

00:39:14
Speaker 2: He'd later say of recording lines, there's a lot of me in there too, because I'm going through my own experiences in.

00:39:19
Speaker 1: There, because I have a conscience.

00:39:21
Speaker 2: Here's a devastating fact to what I learned while researching this episode. Billy West has been very open about the abuse he experience as a child from his father, and he said that he developed his impressionism skills as a way to distract himself from his trauma. So that's horrifying or strong and brave. I don't know which.

00:39:40
Speaker 1: No, I hate that. It makes me very sad.

00:39:42
Speaker 2: Yeah I do too, But it sounds like this role brought him a lot of joy. He tells the story of staying in a bed and breakfast soon after Doug launched, and he came down into the common area one morning to find a bunch of kids in front of the communal television watching Doug. And he said, my heart was warmed and I sat there and I I watched it with them, and I can't remember if I let everybody in on it or not. I just wanted to watch the reaction and see if it had the effect that I thought it would have.

00:40:08
Speaker 1: That's very sweet.

00:40:09
Speaker 2: He also had some very cute run ins with fans over the years as well. He said, I was at a convention once and this big biker came up to me with this whole compliment of leather jackets, boots and the whole works. He's got this big handlebar mustache, and he comes over and goes, I can't do a gruff voice.

00:40:25
Speaker 1: It's not in my nature. Brother Doug was my whole childhood. He just seemed like he was a little boy. Again. There wasn't I could have done that better, but just do the macho man. Randy Savage for brother Doug was my whole childhood.

00:40:41
Speaker 2: Speaking of voices, I totally forgot that the voice of Patty Maynaise is Constin Schulman, who's Yoga Jones on Orange is the New Black.

00:40:48
Speaker 1: Aw. Yeah. Oh, she did a commercial for Kraft Mayonnaise in nineteen eighty nine. No eighty nine, not ninety nine.

00:40:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's hilarious. Well, speaking of voices. We talk about Fred Newman, who was hired to do the voice of Skeeter, including his honks and also pork Chop and Mister Dink complete with his sputters, but he also worked double duty getting the show's a cappella theme together. Jim Jenkins later said, I love fooling with different sounds, taking a conventional type of music but spinning it by throwing in some weird instrument. Fred showed me how you could take out a guitar and I can use it and use a tunic can filled with water that you thump with your finger.

00:41:26
Speaker 1: That's it. That's all we got on the theme song. Yeah, that's it.

00:41:31
Speaker 2: They got a lot about the Beats, though, I bet you, dude, we can't talk about music on Doug without talking about the greatest rock and roll band in the world, The Beats, with hits like killer Tofu, shout your lungs out and I need more allowance or is it need my allowance?

00:41:47
Speaker 1: I think it's more? Yeah, more, it was more? OK? Good? Why? Because I do.

00:41:56
Speaker 2: Their place in the rock pantheon is secure. We know their names. Lead singer Monroe Yoder chap Litman on guitar Flounder on drums and Wendy Nespah on keys.

00:42:07
Speaker 1: I didn't know Wendy. I don't think I remember Flounder either.

00:42:10
Speaker 2: They were inspired, of course, by the Beatles, as the logo suggests, among other more modern New Wave influences like the Rhythmics, but of course the Beatles remained the biggest influence. Jim Jenkins would say, I was a kid during the British Invasion era, so again right place, right time as a kid. In terms of music, the Beats were certainly inspired by the Beatles, but it's also the Rolling Stones, the Who, and many other groups. If you notice, with the band, acrimony is at the very core of their being. So they're always having their breakup last concert or reunion concert. And that's the Who Who. Seemed like they just broke up every year. True, some of the ways they're drawn remind me of Robert Plant and Ringo Starr. Our drummer Clyde Littman. Oh, oh, I think he's gotten the I think he's gotten the names wrong. Our drummer Clyde Littman talks like Ringo. It's a mixed bag of those exotic British Invasion bands. This bugs me because the lead single looks exactly like John Lenny to me all the way down to the round classes.

00:43:03
Speaker 1: But I won't argue with this man. I kind of thought they were part of like they had some ramones in there too. Oh I could see that.

00:43:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I guess the voice actor Fred Newman, who is the voice of lead singer Monroe Yoder, voiced his singing voice on sting.

00:43:19
Speaker 1: Hmmm, terrible. Yeah.

00:43:21
Speaker 2: But now what about their smash hit Killer Tofu? Is it a strident anthem against veganism? Jim Jenkins says this is not so. He says, in that particular case, an outside writer named Alan Silberberg came up with that. And the primary thing about Killer Tofu is that it made us all laugh more than healthy eating or anything.

00:43:39
Speaker 1: It just made us laugh.

00:43:41
Speaker 2: So we worked around it and gave that notion of Killer Tofu to our music guys Fred Newman and Dan Sawyer, who took it and turned it into a song. And I guess this guy was also behind Banging on the trash Can, which is the song that Doug writes for his garage band with Skeeter to put him at a friend's birthday party.

00:43:56
Speaker 1: I think b B Bluff's birthday party and Ug's fantasy.

00:44:00
Speaker 2: Music video for the song features nods to David Byrne's big suit that he wore in the Talking Heads concert film Stopped Making Sense, directed by Jonathan Demi, who also directed Silence of the Lambs, which we talked about last week.

00:44:13
Speaker 1: Hence the synergy there, there's always a connection.

00:44:15
Speaker 2: I want to go back through all the one hundred and eleven episodes we've done now and try to find a way to link that episode with the previous one.

00:44:23
Speaker 1: I wonder if we could make it.

00:44:23
Speaker 2: All the way back almost certainly, Yeah, yeah, six degrees of TMI. If anyone works out like a whole graph of that or like a diagram, send it our way and we'll you five bucks.

00:44:35
Speaker 1: You know, Fred Newman has two Emmys. You mentioned him in he gave him a single graph, You gave him three lines. Well, tell me about him, great big story. The website did an interview with Fred Newman, who is the voice of Gizmo the Magua and who's in The Aliens and Men in Black, among many other things, where he's just sitting in his living room running through all of the Doug voices and it's amazing. As you mentioned earlier, he said a big part of what they wanted to do with the theme song was not just use the kind of a cappella sounds, but percussion in things that would have been at hand for children that might want to make music with. Hence the shaker sounds, hence the sort of beatboxing of it. But that's all done in his own voice. That's not supposed to be any of the characters for the show. And yes, sadly he confirms that the lead singer of the Beats is based on Sting or at least his voice. Sorry, as you were, I'm very impressed that you know so much about Fred Newman. I just love voice actors. Yes, I know you do.

00:45:42
Speaker 2: Jim Jenkins, I know you have some not very positive feelings about him, but he is a very i would say, beautiful quote about the song Banging on a trash Can that he gave to Vice of all people, he says that the meaning of Banging on a trash can is make your own music. And remember the hook was think Big. It was this whole idea of even if you're a kid, you have your kid powers intact and you can do and dream anything, and you can accomplish anything. This one little voice can do this thing if nowhere else in your imagination. It starts with us hanging around in the backyard with sticks, banging on a trash can. That's what the KKK's motto was for a while. My band in high school did bang it on a trash can. I'm sorry, I should stop undercutting you. It's very sweet. It's a very sweet quote. He seems like a lovely man. This is terminally boring. We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment.

00:46:54
Speaker 1: Doug premiered as part of the Nicktoons programming block on August eleventh, nineteen ninety one. It has the distinction of being the very first Nicktoon, followed by Rugrats and rend and Stimpy to watch. The first episode, Jenkins and his New York based creative team rented out his beloved Mexican restaurant where he'd first developed the show all those years earlier, and they really came to the air fully formed, not just from the art style, but in the first episode, we meet Doug Yancey Funny. Doug gets pranked by the local bully Roger meets his crush Patty, and his new best friend Skeeter gets bailed out of trouble by his trusty dog, pork Chop. It's all there right from the jump. One crucial difference though in the pilot episode, Doug originally wrote in a diary instead of a journal, while in later episodes Doug would get annoyed whenever another character referred to his journal as a diary. Doug initially underperformed when it was first released, at least comparatively. Ren and Stimpy and Rugrats both became immediate cross demo hits. You remember. Rugrats was temporarily canceled until it did so well in reruns that they brought it back. Success of Ren and Stimpy, along with The Simpsons and Beavis and Butt heead, helped jump start the adult animation genre, which had been languishing since The Flintstones. Rugrats became the most successful of the shows from a broadcast standpoint, remaining in production for thirteen years until two thousand and four. Meanwhile, Doug struggled to find an audience. This made Nickelodeon nervous, considering they had been banking on Doug to be the breakout hit of their three openers. This understandably led to some tension between Jenkins and the network. His description of the era very much sounds like a Doug cutaway. The way I remember it is, one day you were in slow motion, tripping through a field of flowers, birds landing on your shoulders, singing, and the next day we're all gonna die. People yell at in each other. You're an idiot. You don't know what you're doing. Not people inside our company, although that could happen, but with the parent company, your co production. I'd go home and see my lovely wife Lisa, who is so patient and supportive, and go I don't know if we're gonna make it. It sounds like this show you're my lovely wife Lisa. Actually, I guess I'm in this you or I'm your lovely wife Lisa, and I'm your lovely wife Lisa. Alex Heigel. I'm just reassociating at this point. Uh. Now we move over to Heigel's conspiracy corner. Everyone's favorite part of the show that happens once every six or seven shows. No one has ever said it's their favorite. I did, except for my except for my lovely supportive wife, Lisa uh. The show gave rise to a number of outlandish fan theories. The big one is that Doug's frequent daydreaming and his alter egos are a result of an undiagnosed mental disorder. Hence the fantasy is involving the superhero Quoioman, secret agent Smash Adams, and the Indiana Jones like Swashbuckler Race Canyon. The most troubling instance of this occurred when Doug has one of his hallucinatory daydreams while riding his bike in traffic and crashes into a car, and often he acts out his musing physically clearly. They are so vivid that he has troubled discerning fantasy from reality, occasionally to near fatal results. Other theories include that he grew up to become Zach Braff from Scrubs or the other guy from How I Met Your Mother and the rest just all from Breddit. God, people on Reddit are weird.

00:50:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, the Rugrats ones have some truly dark fan theories. I remember doing that for the first episode, and that was that was rough.

00:50:31
Speaker 1: I like the Schizophrenia one. I can buy that. Yeah, well, maybe Nickelodeon suddenly started thinking of Doug as the others because in nineteen ninety four they pulled the plug.

00:50:44
Speaker 2: Yes after four seasons, they declined to pick up the option for the fifth season, supposedly because the budget cuts, but Doug was also not really in line with the creative direction that they wanted to pursue. Following the world beating success of Rugrats and Red and Stimpy, Doug director Juvett Kaplan si Doug was too sweet, too nice, too tender, Ren and Snippy was the big hit. They wanted to do things that were edgier, So Jim Jenkins started shopping Doug around to other networks in Disney as they are wont to do made him an offer that he couldn't refuse. That's Jim Jenkins's literal quote. In exchange for buying Jumbo Productions, Jim Jenkins production company that created Doug, Doug would become the marquee feature of ABC's which was owned by Disney's newly launched One Saturday Morning cartoon block, and thus the ruining of Doug began. It was a very difficult transition from nickelodeonto Disney, and one that many of the original writers and directors did not make quite a few people left the project, and the biggest change to the O curred when Doug went from nickelodeonto Disney was that the production lost Billy West, voice of Doug. My beloved Billy West, and the reasons for why Billy West left depend on who you ask. Jim Jenkins claims that West hated Disney and was making outrageous salary demands that would have just tanked the show's budget, considering they were going from Nickelodeon, which was still a relative outlaw upstart, to Disney. I find this hard to believe because the House of Mouse has some deep pockets.

00:52:12
Speaker 1: Billy West, on the other.

00:52:12
Speaker 2: Hand, claims that Disney wanted to essentially make him take a pay cut all wall forcing him to do even more characters. I read up to eight voices on the show that sounds more in lined with what we know about Disney, but I'll refrained from editorializing any further. Billy West later told the Huffington Post it was a deal that I just couldn't take. No One was taking me seriously, and they kept sending me deal memos, and they kept saying time is running out, and I kept saying, I don't care. Jim Jenkins, in his role as Resident Nice Guys, spent many years worried that Billy West didn't know how hard he fought to try to keep him on the show. Jenkins said, we have one hundred and eighty degree different storytelling about this. But I was there and he was not. He's been told what his agents tell him. The deal was just breaking the back of our budget, and Billy doesn't know that. And Billy has recently said that he can't bring himself to watch the Disney episodes of Doug because it's too painful. But given all the Doug related events that he does, it seems like he and Jim Jenkins are fine for these Disney episodes. The production instead hired the voice talent of Tom McHugh, who does not have a Wikipedia page. I'm sure he's a lovely man. And as a result of these slight change in Doug's voice, the writers of the show aged Doug by a year in this new Disney version, taking him from eleven and a half to twelve and a half.

00:53:36
Speaker 1: Did you watch it once? It moved a couple times. I was more of a recess guy. Mmmm. Yeah, recess was fine. Yeah, yeah, I liked Recess a lot. Yeah, this pretty much ended that guy's career. His IMDb page stops with one other teenage series, with one other TV series, p B and Jay Otter, which he was in one episode of in two thousand and then it abruptly stops. And that's the Jim Jenkins production. Wow. Wow, Sorry Thomas. Shouldn't have Billy West, shouldn't have scabbed, shouldn't have crossed the picket line. Well. Despite the voice actor kerfuffle, Disney production kicked into high gear and the new version of Doug launched in September of nineteen ninety six. In order to differentiate the show from the Nick incarnation, its official title was Disney's brand Spankin New Doug or just Disney's Doug, both of which suck. Why brand spankin New Why? Who would say that? Who would? How do they know that it would not immediately date it and get it clowned on into perpetuity? Ah C, sweet brain God, I hate executives. Um, if you are listening to this and you have an MBA to rethink your life. Numerous annoying tweaks were done to the show. A new less good theme song, notably and the near universal consensus is that this version is nowhere near as good as the Nick original. There's actually a whole article dedicated to this phenomenon on Refinery twenty nine called Let's be honest, Disney Ruined Doug by Ali Hixon. She outlines the many minor character changes they made that messed with the emotional heart of the show. For example, Roger was portrayed as much more of a bully than he was in the Nick original, and he also went from living in a trailer park to being rich, thus eliminating the only element of socioeconomic diversity on the show and removing a possible mitigating factor for his character. Why would they do that? They're like, Oh, this bully character is too finely shaded because he's also poor. Let's make him even more cartoonishly incredible Sea Sweet Brain. In Hickson's piece, she also writes about being especially offended by the character of Connie. One of the most glaring examples. She writes, Connie was a fun secondary character on the Nickelodeon show who hung out with Patty and Beebie. She was also fantastic because she didn't have the same body as every other cartoon girl on the show, Connie wasn't skinny, she had curves. They never made her body central to her storyline, but it was still part of who she was. When the show went to Disney, Connie became noticeably thinner. They even made it part of the plot that Connie went to a beauty farm with her mom over the summer. How awful is that? That is? That is up. They also messed with a literal format of the show, taking it from two eleven minute stories to one twenty two minute long story. So instead of having these smaller versions where you could focus in on a secondary character or just get bizarre, the plots then had to sustain a full episode, and that's when you start getting into sitcom territory with the cliched stories and plot structures and beats. No one associated with the show would argue the merits of the Disney episodes over the Nick originals, and most fans blamed Disney for meddling with Jenkins wholesome show, although he claims that the alterations were generally his call. We'd already done one hundred and fifty some odd stories, so our writing team was looking for a way to restart. The changes were my doing. I wanted to shake it up. He also said that part of his new Disney Deer required him to do a fair of executive work, which left him overwhelmed and stretched thin, so he admits that his hand was taken off the wheel just a bit. He'd later say, I mostly agree with Doug fans who think the original one hundred and four eleven minute Doug stories made for nick were the best. His production partner, David Campbell, felt the Nickelodeon stories were quirkier and better, while Constance Schulmann, Patty Manneys's voice actress, bemoaned the fact that production relocated to La so all the New York based voice actors had to do their parts remotely. She'd say, I missed all the gang crammed in the studio waiting for their turn for the big group scene. Someone just dimmed the magic a little bit. I missed I missed the cocaine. Billy West had the best stuff.

00:57:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is pretty much when I stopped engaging with Doug. And I'm tempted to say the bad decisions on both Nickelodeon and Disney's parts squandered this gem of a show. But researching this episode, I was surprised to see that Doug was way more in the mix than ever. Once it moved to Disney, there was a live action musical, Disney's theme park, and toy merchandise with fast food tie ins. And when the Disney version of the show ended in nineteen ninety nine, they capped off the series with Doug's First Movie. That's the name of it. That's not a descriptor. It's also a bad first name. Yeah, you know think I as much as I love the show, and as much as I think that Jim Jenkins is saying okay, guy, a lot of these are first draft ideas. The plot of Doug's First Movie is kind of shaky. Doug and Skeeter discover a horrifying monster in a local lake, and after getting to know the monster, they become friends with it and discover that the titans of industry in Bluffington, including BB's dad, I think we're polluting the lake.

00:58:39
Speaker 1: See.

00:58:39
Speaker 2: I hate shows that are like based in some form of reality, and then midway through they add like a fantastical element. That's why I hated Gazoo and Flints in the Flintstones. I have thoughts on this. Jink and see me after class. But I guess it doesn't really matter that the plot was crappy because it was supposed to go to home video, which is kind of you know, this is we're in their a game innw it. But then the powers of be it Nickelodeon decided to put in theaters after seeing how well the nineteen ninety eight movie for the Rugrats did, and Jim Jenkins and Erotic after my Own Heart was both thrilled and terrified by this. He said, we were originally making a direct to video movie of Doug that we were assured would never see the big screen. That reflected in its budget, its schedule, and the way we animated it. Then we're almost done and about to deliver it, and for whatever reason, Disney looked at the rough cut of the story and decided that we're going to fly to New York. They came to tell me that my Doug movie was going to go theatrical. Of course I fainted. Why in my life did I ever think I'd be given that shot? Right behind that panic and fainting from that good news was the notion.

00:59:43
Speaker 1: Of how do we get it ready?

00:59:45
Speaker 2: And it did okay financially with a five million dollar budget, It earned nineteen million in the box office, and things seemed pretty bright prior to its release, with the La Times estimating that the value of the Doug franchise was about one hundred million dollar in nineteen ninety nine, so there seemed every possibility that Doug could live on in movies, But his first runout was not received well by critics, and I personally don't really remember this movie ever being talked about much and doesn't have Dug a lot more. Yeah, I liked Dug a lot more than I liked rug Rats, but I actually like owned the Rugrats movie, and I think I saw it in theaters too, So yeah, there must have been some kind of advertising whiff there, or maybe it just looked bad.

01:00:28
Speaker 1: I don't know what else happened with it. Not much. Is that sad for them? Oh the movie? What do you think about it? I know nothing about it. Well, it's kind of like, I mean, the Simpsons movie kind of bombed too, didn't it. That's a good question.

01:00:44
Speaker 2: I don't know if it bombed or not, but it was the kind of thing like no one felt the need to do another, which leads me to believe that it failed on some level.

01:00:53
Speaker 1: I think it came in late, but it did. It did have a five hundred and thirty six million worldwide. The Simpsons, yeah, on a seventy five million budget. But like no one talks about the Simpsons movie, my dad is endlessly entertained by the spider Pig bit. So there's that. The Doug Movie essentially spelled the end of Doug everything else. By the dawn of the two thousands, more irreverent, fast paced shows like SpongeBob, Dexter's Laboratory and my personal favorite, Angry Beavers became all the rage, essentially following in the footsteps of Red and Stimpy. In that sense, that show won the Battle of the Nicktoons in terms of influence, but in a sense the spirit. But in a sense, the spirit of Doug lived on in the PBS animated series Arthur, which was a similarly structured show, and several people who worked on Doug went and worked on that. Jim Jenkins Jumbo Productions closed down, probably because they sold the whole thing to Disney, and he and his production partner formed Cartoon Pizza, which produced a show called Jojo Circus shorts for Sesame Streets and Jenkins created the kids show pbj Otter, which is the only other voice credit of the new voice of Doug, and another show for Nick Junior called Allegra's Window. As of twenty seventeen, Jenkins lives in Brunswick, Georgia, where he runs what he calls a wordsmithing workshop. Boy, I hate that. In recent years he started kicking around an idea, at least in interviews for what he called Doug's Last Movie. As a bookend to Doug's First movie, he goes to an Ethanas clinic in Switzerland. I was gonna say, goes to a right to die state. Talking to Lauren Duco for The Huffington Post in twenty fourteen, Jenkins described it as focusing on the ways we process our childhood friendships and what they mean to us even after they've come to an end. That would be the final message to fans. These relationships change and they shape us, but they don't last forever.

01:03:00
Speaker 2: And this brings us to Doug and his beloved Patty Mayonnaise. Jenkins has been asked many times over the years whether he thinks that they ended up together, and you know, it's a fair question.

01:03:09
Speaker 1: They are sweet together. Patty once kissed him on the cheek, and in.

01:03:12
Speaker 2: The final episode of the series, she asks Doug out on a date. And yet, when pressed on the subject, Jenkins' is adamant that the pair do not end up together. Speaking to EW in twenty sixteen, he explained his reasoning quote, it doesn't happen because really, most people don't end up with their first loves.

01:03:30
Speaker 1: But then again, maybe they do. There isn't some rule. It's not in the Bible. It's just that most people don't.

01:03:36
Speaker 2: I don't know the answer yet, but I would predict that what I would do is make it where Patty is maybe not married, but in a serious relationship. And he goes on the theorized that Doug would cope with this crushing blow by pouring his heart out to a friend of his who happens to be a girl. And he continues and naturally, I guess maybe it's a little predictable, but that's the one, that's the one he's comfortable enough to bear his soul to in this next phase of his life.

01:03:59
Speaker 1: And he discovers the love and didn't even know it. That was me all through high school. Just the most cliches possible yeah.

01:04:10
Speaker 2: But you know, once again, he's taking this from his real life. Jim Jenkins might feel this way because that's very similar to how it worked out with the real Patty in his life.

01:04:18
Speaker 1: On a Nickelodeon.

01:04:18
Speaker 2: Podcast, he told the story of how he met up with the woman who inspired Patty in the eighties when he was in his wilderness years, sucking down Margarita's at this Mexican restaurant all day. I'd like to quote him. It's my ten year reunion, he says, and I didn't go. I was in New York working like crazy as a freelancer and just trying to make it there. And I got a phone call in New York and it's Patty, the real Patty, and my heart's beating fast. She's like, I was at the reunion and you weren't. And I was like, yeah, sorry, I had to work. And she goes, I found out you live in New York. Guess what I do too, And she told me where she lives, and he lived across Central Park from one another, and she says, why didn't you come over for dinner? And he likens the leader up to a Doug episode. He says he's thinking what do I wear? What are you gonna look like? All that's happening is I'm walking across Central Park to her apartment, just wondering and just hoping all those things. I was at the time very available. And so I walk up to the apartment and I hear the lock turn. It's getting ready to happen, and she opens the door and she's perfect, just perfect. She looks spectacular and she's so happy and her arms fly up and we hug. This is all wonderful, right, And then she wheels around and goes, oh, Jimmy, I want you to meet my husband. And I don't even remember the rest of the evening.

01:05:32
Speaker 1: That's so sad. What a sad little beta he is? So is Doug. What a sad? This is high fidelity.

01:05:40
Speaker 2: Ah, And yeah, you know, I've been talking about doing a episode on my beloved Wonder Years for months now. And spoiler, it's the same reason why the writers didn't have Kenny and Winnie end up together in the Wonder Years, because that's not especially realistic, Jenkins said of his own experience with the real life Patty In the end, that's the way life is.

01:06:00
Speaker 1: It's bittersweet. It doesn't always work out the way you dreamed.

01:06:05
Speaker 2: And I'm struggling to think an uplifting kicker for such a gut punch of an emotional truth. So allow me to quote from the poet laureates Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, whose lives I am documenting on another podcast that is slowly killing me, which is why I have so few brain cells left to come up with any other closing sentiments for this episode. You can't always get what you want, but if you try, sometimes you find you get what you need. And you know, Jim Jenkins seems to have a good life, and he says that people still regularly come up with him and say thank you for making a show that taught me how to treat people.

01:06:39
Speaker 1: And I think that's a pretty cool legacy. Is that it close the thoughts?

01:06:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's all I uh, I'm very And the really weird thing is watching you do that, Like the sounds don't match up with what your mouth is doing. I don't know if it's a lag and zoom or if it's just yeah, it's pretty cool. I'll try to like on's I get the video of this back, I'll cut that out and send it. I don't really want to see that, I'd say maybe don't. Uh.

01:07:33
Speaker 4: Final thoughts, Final thoughts, Final thoughts, folks, thank you for listening.

01:07:49
Speaker 1: This has been too much information. I'm a beatbox, I'm Alex, and I'm Jordan run Sog. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtogg. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtogg and Alex Heigel.

01:08:16
Speaker 2: With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.